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One important recent theme emerging from the literature on early modern Europe is that some of the key structural and institutional changes that are responsible for the increases in incomes may have taken place rather early, in the late medieval period or in the era of the Black Death. This study makes use of the recently compiled real wage evidence for different parts of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean to gain further insights into this period. The era of the Black Death witnessed a series of important long-term changes in demographic behaviour, in agriculture, in manufacturing, trade and technology. Real wage series reflect the productivity increases from these changes. They also suggest the Low Countries and England were able to resist to a greater extent the general tendency for wages to decline during the second leg of the demographic cycle that began with the Black Death. A wage gap thus began to emerge between the northwest and the rest of the continent after 1450. The last section of the article explores the reasons for this divergence.

This article attempts to quantify the decline of Spain over the period 1500–1850. In contrast to earlier estimates that focus almost exclusively on Castilian agriculture, we look at trends in urbanisation and construct new measures of agricultural and aggregate output at both regional and national levels. A distinctive long-run behaviour is found across Spanish regions that rejects the identification between Castile and Spain. Per capita income grew in the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while contraction and stagnation occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the long run, output per head did not improve until the early nineteenth century. At the time of its imperial expansion Spain was a relatively affluent nation and, by 1590, was only behind the Low Countries and Italy in terms of per capita income. Spain's decline has its roots in the seventeenth century while its backwardness deepened in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Were eighteenth-century financial markets efficient? Neal (1990) shows that the London and Amsterdam markets were integrated. Yet some scholars find that the London capital market was either not integrated across various classes of securities, or was comprised of ignorant investors who were not knowledgeable enough to arbitrage across securities with different maturities, or was even irrational at times. In this article, we demonstrate that these London capital market inefficiencies suggested by previous scholars arise from an incorrect comprehension of the pricing of the financial instrument they use. After examining certain features peculiar to India bonds overlooked by previous authors, we make it clear that the London domestic market was perfectly integrated and that investors were capable of handling and pricing sophisticated options.

This article examines the impact of endowments, property rights and political conflict on the diffusion of cream separators in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Favourable endowments, access to finance and owner-occupancy promoted the spread of cream separators, while in areas with more small farms political conflict slowed down the diffusion of separators as well as of cooperatives. The structure of property rights and political conflict help explain why Irish agriculture was less successful than Danish agriculture during this period.